Oh, To Be the Friend of God...

“You are my friends if you do what I command you.” – John 15.14

All human societies are arranged according to hierarchies. Employer to employee; teacher to student; parent to child. We moderns tend to resent such hierarchies for their own sake. Authority and corruption are practically synonyms. Apartheid, genocide, and infanticide are not merely possibilities; they are inherited memories or ongoing events. We have seen the greatest atrocities committed by the most powerful tyrants; or, worst of all, by men who “thought all along they were doing the right thing.” Thus we are skeptical of authority whether we wield it or whether we find ourselves subject to it. Why else do you find so many parents asking their children for advice on how to raise them? We don’t want to be in charge; we want to be friends. We don’t want subjection, but freedom.

The Cross has given us opportunity for both of these things. God, in Christ, reaches out His hand and offers us friendship; but it is friendship unlike the kind we are accustomed to on earth for: “we are His friends if we do what He asks.” His friendship presupposes surrender to His authority. Now, under normal, earthly conditions, people who talk in this way are usually of the Bullying or Queen Bee variety. They have a hint of the masochist in them. They are palpably delighted by exercising authority over others, by making them admit and own their weakness. This “strength,” however, is really just veiled weakness because it needs the other to subsist. It is parasitic; like the physically large but insecure boy who feeds off the fear he inspires in his smaller classmate. Or the attractive young girl whose superiority depends on surrounding herself with other, relatively less attractive or emotionally pliable girls whose will she can bend to her own, and whose ‘weakness’ she can exploit.

But the friendship of God is precisely the opposite. His strength is His own; He does not need us to maintain or uphold it. Christ offers us friendship – which is reconciliation with God – at His expense, not ours. He died so that we might have it. In fact it is we who are invited to feed on His body – His flesh and His blood – so that the life within us, His life, may endure eternally.

By His strength, we are strong. By His beauty we are made beautiful. Moreover, God delights in granting us these things. It is His nature to do so. All we need do is accept. For Him to insist on having it His way, then, is not tyranny. It is pure mercy. Whatever ‘constraints’ Christ places on our friendship by asking us to submit to Him, as well as the earthly authorities He institutes, are there for our protection.

Friendship with God begets freedom, but it is freedom with constraint. John’s gospel says, “Whom the Son sets free is free indeed.” And yet we are called to use our freedom to act as bondslaves of God (1 Pet. 2.16). At the heart of Christianity lies paradox: to live you must die; to be free you must obey.

Thus we obey, in faith, believing that this not only finds favor with God, but that we, along with those under whose authority we stand, will someday give an account to “Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead” (1 Pet. 4.5).